I am an ‘old boy’ of the same school as Henry Francis Lyte.  It also spawned Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett but that’s for another day.  I blame Henry – probably no good at rugger either – for the all-pervading ‘change and decay’ linkage.  Apparently he provided a tune as well so he can’t be blamed for that inestimably dreary one which we always use.

Anyway, tomorrow sees us reaching our special Diocesan Synod at which [I hope] our Proposed Diocesan Policy will receive the authorisation of Synod.  They say you should never change more than one thing at a time.  Pity about that – because this is pretty comprehensive.  But it needs to be and people have been very brave in the way in which they have shared in shaping it.

Makes me think about the ways in which the church successfully avoids change:

• tells you to do it ‘one bit at a time’ so you get utterly bogged down and tired out
• makes you so busy you haven’t got time to read the ‘Busy Priest’s Handbook’
• sends you to Achill or to Craggy Island so that you can think beautiful thoughts about change all on your own
• draws you into its soggy embrace by making you a Dean or a Bishop or something equally enervating

No doubt there are others ..

 

Well we gathered in our Cathedral in Edinburgh today for Tom’s funeral – family and friends, members of the parish in Oakworth, Mission to Seafarers and various members of the blogging community. I don’t think it has altogether sunk in yet.

This was the eulogy. The funeral of a priest is a strange thing – there are so many layers to what we become. Tom had done as we all do – stood in church at a funeral and struggled to find words to express meaning in apparent meaninglessness – said the words of faith and tested his own faith against them. Philip had found words from Tom’s own addresses at funerals – so I was able to place Tom’s very compassionate and pastoral faith at the heart of it.

And then … we went into the pub at Haymarket and raised a glass to Tom. Strange things, funerals.

Lots of interesting things this weekend – the secret gardens of the Royal Mile have become a major tourist attraction.  Blogstead surely can’t be far behind.

But it’s also been one of those weekends where a number of things gathered together around the same theme.  Our St Ninian’s Cathedral in Perth held an Open Day on Saturday with a special welcome for the Provost and other public representatives on Saturday morning.   And I said a few things about the confidence which I hope we are discovering as a church – working with others to serve the whole community.  Strangely the same theme appeared when I went to St John’s, Forfar on Sunday morning where our congregation was hosting the Service for the Kirkin’ of the Council.  It’s not often that these services are held in SEC churches – a recognition that our people there used the opportunity of Forfar Gala Week to make their church visible in the community.  In the sermon, I began by saying to the Provost that their presence ‘honours us and changes us’ – meaning that here again we are discovering a new confidence about being a church for the whole community.

And finally, as if all those excitements weren’t enough, we went off to Bishop Bob’s Cathedral in Aberdeen for the Ordination of Samantha.  It was a great evening.  The ordination sermon was something like this.  And those of us who like to get self-indulgently misty-eyed at these things had a great time.

How can it be that a huge travel company can just go bust without warning leaving 65000 people stranded? Does it happen like this in other places like this? And then one ponders the difficulties of the Channel Tunnel. What if one’s car is third in the queue when they had to close it and there are now 5000 others behind it – how does one ever get away from there?

Meanwhile, I’m spending too much time in transit between here and Edinburgh – a product of my sojurn with the Mission and Ministry Board. I was travelling back to Perth happily at the end of the second day when I realised that I should actually have been going to Dunblane. Ah well.

And I slipped in another Thought for the Day this week. A perfectly reasonable tour of the Millennium Development Goals.  But then I realised that I should really have done the CERN thingy which was about to be switched on and bring the world to a premature end. That would have allowed me to continue to obsess about Sarah Palin and the Creationists ..

We were just getting to know Tom and suddenly he’s gone ..

Tom became Chaplain for the Scottish Ports with Mission to Seafarers in June this year.  He and Anne moved to Linlithgow with Catherine and Matthew.  Tom was doing work which he loved and they were living in a place which they love.  He died suddenly yesterday evening.

One always struggles with ‘in the midst of life we are in death’  The midst of life for Tom was a very intense place.  He was a great priest – passionate in his faith, catholic in his vision, erudite in his theology.  We bloggers knew and appreciated him as Big Bulky Anglican – take a look and marvel at the range of his interests in music, reading, theology and all of life.

For his friends in ministry, the loss is very great.  Tom had the capacity to reshape our whole attitude to chaplaincy – not just among seafarers but in many other areas as well.  But our loss is as nothing to that of his family.  Tom was an adored husband and father.  Our sympathy and our prayers are with them.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

They were bringing in the sheaves at Blogstead today. You will of course immediately wonder what that is on the computer screen – some diagrammatic representation of a thrusting diocesan strategic plan, perhaps. Not so. I had just asked my old friend Multimap where I might find Lumphinnans.

You’ll be glad to know that my visit to Lochgelly fulfilled all my best expectations. My soon-to-be-published guide ‘Getting by in Bishopping’ mentions two greetings which strike fear into the heart of the Bishop as he visits a congregation. The first is, ‘We’re doing the usual’ – when you haven’t the faintest idea what the usual is. The second is, ‘We’re not using the readings from the lectionary.’ That’s the one I met today. Fortunately a marginal tweaking of the all-purpose episcopal sermon dealt with that.

They’re a small congregation but great fun to be with. With typical panache, they dealt with the difficult ethical issue of whether it is all right to go straight from the Eucharist into a raffle – what they call in Northern Ireland a ‘wee ballot’. The heating has stopped working and they have to raise money urgently. One of the Rectors with whom I served as a curate resolved this issue in typically gnomic style by saying that it was all right to have a raffle provided that the prize wasn’t anything which anyone would want. No need for such Jesuitical circumlocutions in Lochgelly. They have a beautifully-wrapped prize – but it’s always the same. Sometimes, indeed, the winner doesn’t even open it. It just goes round again and serves its purpose. And the money gets raised.

We ended yesterday at a wonderful concert for Organ and Brass in Dunkeld Cathedral.  But many of the audience will have been unaware that an equally great work of art is just outside – National Cycle Route No 77 goes along the south side of the Cathedral and then along the Tay for several miles.  We did some of it on Saturday morning but stopped short of Inverness.

For some reason, I don’t seem to be keeping up to pace these days in the great blogathon of life. Must do better.

Interesting time last night when Tim was instituted as Rector of Dunfermline and Rosyth. It was a good evening – as always the end of a long story. Full details are available on Max the Dog’s Blog. Dunfermline is growing rapidly, limited only by the capacity of the Forth Bridge to carry commuters into Edinburgh. So it’s a place of wonderful potential in ministry. I almost envied him – but not quite.

There were some classic moments – most of which are not for sharing on a blog. But I did particularly enjoy the moment when I was handed a thurible to cense the altar. It’s never a particularly easy operation for me if I have drifted off into Portadown mode. This thurible was manifestly dead, extinguished and not alight. I turned to Dom who was acting as my Chaplain and asked him what I should do with it. Although he was without his copy of Ceremonial of Bishops at that moment, he still give me his usual discreet advice.

So off tomorrow to Lochgelly which was recorded in 2007 as having the lowest house prices in Britain. This is one of the former mining communities of Fife and it’s struggling to  climb out of a ‘pit’ of social and economic deprivation.  I’m very fond of it because our small congregation there is sustained by a group of wonderful people who have a sort of Belfast-like determination about them. If, as they used to say in Belfast-speak, ‘the windeys was blew out’, they would just put them back in and carry on.

Haven’t done a Thought for the Day for a while – too busy with Lambeth and other stuff. So here is one about Sarah Palin.  We went to Glasgow last night and I became convinced that she was going to blow up and resign before I could get it delivered [ouch!] at 7.20 this morning.

One of the best things about what clergy and bishops do is that we move at all sorts of levels in society.  I know that much of what I deal with can be a bit shambolic.  What interests me is that every other level that I visit is equally shambolic.  Was she vetted?  Well they may have short-circuited the processes a bit.  How well did John McCain know her before naming her as his running mate.  Well they had spoken twice.

I know she is the darling of the Christian right.  But I think she will cost him the election.   Not – by the way – because of the sad story of her daughter or anything like that.  More because of that scary feeling that we may not yet know everything that there is to know.

I sometimes find myself saying that what I miss most about parish ministry is funerals.  Which seems strange.  But I suspect that most of the things which drew many of us into ministry in the first place are to be found there.

So I was interested to have the opportunity of taking part in the Pathways Through Grief Conference which was hosted yesterday and today by NHS Tayside.  It was an impressive event and I said a bit about the role of faith communities.  And you’ll find a bit in there about why I miss funerals.

Always interested in people’s reactions to authority.  When told to evacuate New Orleans, most people comply.  But there are always some who either think they know better or who just don’t do what they are told.  Shades of the Lambeth bed controversy.  For myself, I’d be on the second bus out.  I did have a chance to talk to the Bishop of Louisiana and found, as he said on the Lambeth Video Diary, that the post-Katrina experience had opened him up to all sorts of alliances and partnerships in working together for the whole community.

But of course .. if the Tay rose 500 feet and the call came to evacuate Blogstead [shades this time of the great septic tank controversy] there would be just one significant issue.  Poppy?